Coca-Cola’s 2025 Christmas Commercial Is AI-Generated Once Again — This Time With Even Fewer People
Coca-Cola is back with another AI-generated Christmas ad this year, and it’s causing conversations online again.
The 2025 holiday spot brings back the brand’s famous trucks traveling across snowy landscapes, but this time the only characters in the ad are animals. The only human figure appears at the end as Santa Claus, based on the original Coca-Cola drawings by Haddon Sundblom.
Coca-Cola’s annual Christmas advert is AI-generated again this year.
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 3, 2025
The company says they used even fewer people to make it — “We need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope… The genie is out of the bottle, and you’re not going to put it back in” pic.twitter.com/g1dogxS8Tq
Last year, Coca-Cola faced heavy criticism for its AI-powered holiday ad, which included AI-generated people, objects, and animals.
Hollywood writer Alex Hirsch joked, “Coca-Cola is red because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists,” highlighting concerns about both the ad’s aesthetics and its impact on human jobs. Despite the backlash, the ad still racked up billions of views.
For this year’s campaign, Coca-Cola worked with Los Angeles-based AI studio Secret Level. The company hopes the new approach will be received better.
Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global vice president and head of generative AI, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Last year people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is ten times better. There will be people who criticize — we cannot keep everyone 100 percent happy. But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way it’s worth going forward.”
The ad shows the Coca-Cola trucks traveling through different locations, with animals like seals and pandas watching along the way. The final shot reveals Santa, based entirely on Sundblom’s archival paintings. These images helped define the modern look of Santa as a bearded man in a red-and-white suit holding a Coke.
Secret Level’s founder, Jason Zada, said the studio wanted the ad to feel like a high-quality animated movie. “The best compliment I get is when people say a video doesn’t look like AI,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
To create the commercial, Coca-Cola and Secret Level used several large AI models to generate animation from thousands of images, shaped and guided by human input. This year, the animals’ expressions and movement were fully AI-generated, something the technology didn’t allow last year.
Coca-Cola has experimented with AI in advertising before. In 2023, the company released “Masterpiece,” which brought museum paintings to life interacting with Coke bottles. That campaign did not receive the backlash that followed last year’s holiday ad.
Thakar explained that the company is embracing AI as part of a larger marketing transformation. “Last year we decided to go all in, and it worked out well for us,” he said. “Consumer engagement was very high. Yes, some parts of the industry were not pleased we were using a 100 percent Generative AI film, but that’s part and parcel of doing something pioneering.”
The 2025 ad uses fewer people to create it than a typical commercial of its size, but Zada sees this as an efficiency rather than a loss of jobs. “You could do 10 times as much at scale,” he said, suggesting that smaller teams could deliver more creative output.
Public reaction to the new AI ad has been mixed. According to media intelligence firm CARMA, 10.2% of online conversations about the ad were positive, while 32% were negative.
Truescope data shows most discussions were neutral, focusing on AI in advertising. Critics argued that the AI-generated ad felt less magical or nostalgic than traditional campaigns, and some suggested Coca-Cola was prioritizing cost-cutting over creativity. Others even expressed support for competitor brands like Pepsi. A few commentators speculated that the controversy itself could be part of Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy.
Thakar remains confident about the future of AI in Coca-Cola’s marketing. “The genie is out of the bottle, and you’re not going to put it back in,” he said. The company plans to continue exploring AI in other campaigns, including major events like March Madness.
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